I guess you could say I found something that I just feel the need to yell about. I know I'm probably sounding a bit redundant here but I have to talk about this paper towel project again. It just dawned on me today as I refilled the paper-towel holder in the kitchen that it has been sometime since I've posted an update. So I started this project back in May. Starting with a $57 investment in reusable kitchen rags a shelf and a $12~12 roll case of Bounty Select-a-size. In the last 5 months we have managed to only use 7 of those original 12 rolls. Here's the kicker folks, we would have gone through nearly 60 rolls, costing around $60, at our rate of normal consumption prior to the start of this project.

Eureka! The project has paid for itself and we have 5 rolls left in the storage room. At this rate we could reduce our paper-towel usage to just 3 cases a year. I think that's awesome. And believe me, I'm not suggesting the end of paper-towel use here folks, just a helpful, more renewable, longer lasting alternative. Paper-towels will always have a home in our kitchen, it's just that they have a different role now, namely the nastier of the jobs. Like raw food clean up and cat puke..gross!

My Wife did the laundry today. As I was putting the kitchen rags up on their shelf I got to thinking about how easy it was to make the transition. I'm not sure about other peoples paper-towel usage but I suppose we would have been an example of a high usage family. Our new towels are all still in great shape and I could honestly see us getting many years use out of them. That's a lot of savings and even more in the end as the price of everything seems to be getting ever more expensive.

I think what we need to do is get some people on board with this idea. Wouldn't it be cool to see major paper towel companies start marketing this to the masses. They would even get the benefit of being able to transition there production away from the Tree based paper market to a more sustainable and faster growing cotton crop or dare I say Hemp. Well, maybe one day.

One another note, I feel the need to give shout out to my new hometown of Warren, Pa up in the northwest part of the state. The city has recently started a very solid recycling program or should I say expanded upon there system. Warren is now recycling 5 major groups of recyclables free of charge to all city residents. They even provided free delivery of free containers to keep your stuff in. The groups are Paper, Plastic, Tin-Aluminum and two types of glass. I do wish they did more in the way of plastics as they only except types 1 and 2. Man was I surprised to here how hard it can be to find places that take all the other types of plastic. I've noticed that since we received our recycle containers a few months back that we have reduced our throw aways considerably. Where as we would generally have 3 to 4 filled trash bags a week we have now gotten consistently down to 1 to 2 bags. 

These are just drops in a bucket I know and the bucket is big....Lord let it rain.

Peace y'all,

~Jay~   

You like to waste. Proud to defend it. It's what everyone else does, so it's good enough for you too.  Proud to be lazy and indifferent because it's easy to be that way.

You waste time, energy, resources and the good sense given to you by nature. As a wasteful person you enthusiastically embrace the four steps of waste:

Time - fighting, complaining, blaming, holding a grudge, revenge

Energy - no one makes an effort and neither do you

Resources - vigorously playing your part in a throw away society, even throwing people away

Sense - turning a deaf ear and blind eye to wisdom, nature and commonsense

Too busy is the irony. Your life is complicated. You are stressed out. Yet you have time to talk crap online with many people you don't care about, and who don't care about you either. You make plans that never happen or babies that are not wanted. Your English is poor, your manners are poor, your humor is poor. You fit in and it's all that matters.

You are lonely and bored. You can't seem to connect these feelings to your 'age of technology'. The latest and greatest are neat. Status symbols even if you feel lonelier and more desperate.  Communicating with real people sounds scary and like work, so you sit on your butt. Communicating with nature is 'icky'.

 You hate and you are hated. Ah, the circle of a wasteful life as you know it.

 Foreign ideas like raising the bar of knowledge and experience, taking the higher road make you laugh. It's safer to remain loyal to ignorance and arrogance. You see bar lowering on tv, Even your politicians are doing it. So, it must be okey for you too. You feel safe. Nothing feels safer than a pack.

For awhile people were living longer but perhaps no longer. Now stress, lack of exercise, lack of community, lack of nature and lack of sense is debilitating or killing people at younger ages. When you hear this, you change the channel. You are going to live forever surrounded by things. And that makes sense.

But...........tried and true keep coming back. It's humanity's hope. One day the wasteful people wake up feeling they have been cheated by life. They realize they did it to themselves. This awareness usually happens after 'the pauses', when you finally start using your mind.

De Anna Lane Aston

copyright 2008

 

Harry Bruce is a well known Nova Scotia columnist. Oct. 14/08 - The Nova Scotian

 "U. S. VICE-PRESIDENTIAL candidate Sarah Palin — the winking, nose-wrinkling, unblinking bombshell from downtown Wasilla, Alaska — has talked openly about the coming "Palin and McCain administration." She also referred to John McCain as "my running mate."

That’s a term that Jake Tapper of ABC News says he doesn’t "recall ever hearing a VP nominee use when discussing the guy at the top of the ticket."

Palin is a fanatically partisan Republican, but the "small-town" vice-president she names as her hero is a Democrat, Harry S. Truman, whose supreme virtue in her eyes is that he succeeded a president who died in office. She is so scatter-brained she claimed that because "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska," she had plenty of foreign policy experience, but there’s nothing fuzzy about her focus on McCain’s health. At 72, he is the oldest candidate ever to seek a first term as president, and has undergone operations for a highly invasive form of skin cancer.

He has recently been showing his age. In his first debate against Barack Obama, he repeated the same joke twice, which reminded one blogger of "your gramps at Thanksgiving." Even while saying "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" no fewer than 17 times, he spoke from notecards. He had trouble with Sunni, Shia, Somali, and other proper nouns that begin with S.

To some, he looked like a foul-tempered geezer who resented having to perform against a shallow and flashy upstart. In their second debate, Obama was loose-limbed, loose-jointed and gliding on his feet, but McCain seemed hunched and stiff. His steps were short, and often hesitant.

Against this background, Frank Rich of the New York Times describes "a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency."

Rich calls her "preposterously unprepared to run the country." Her only claim to fame, says Joseph A. Palermo of the Huffington Post website is that "she has five kids, one with Down syndrome, and one that is underage and pregnant, which would be no biggie if she didn’t so vociferously and self-righteously oppose sex education or contraceptives in favour of ‘abstinence’ only . . . .

"So there you have it. The Republican masters of the universe . . . decided that a female Christian fundamentalist, who is anti-abortion, anti-environment, anti-stem cell research, who hunts and wears furs and is a former beauty queen with no gravitas at all is just as qualified as Dick Cheney to be vice-president."

Palin says her lack of international experience is no big deal because Americans just aren’t interested in "somebody’s big fat resume maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment where, yes, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state."

Now that’s terrifying.

It suggests Palin believes that a U. S. president — while dealing with al-Qaida terrorists, the worst financial crisis in eight decades, the rise of China, and with poverty, fratricidal warfare and AIDS epidemics in the third world — requires no experience, knowledge or thoughtfulness.

As president, all she will need is the ability to avoid blinking. Asked about fighting terrorism, she said, "We must do whatever it takes and we must not blink . . . in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target."

Palin loves to talk about the virtues of not blinking.

Can you believe it?

The New York Times does not want to:

"This nation has suffered through eight years of an ill-prepared and unblinkingly obstinate president. One who didn’t pause to think before he started a disastrous war of choice in Iraq. One who blithely looked the other way as Taliban and al-Qaida regrouped in Afghanistan. One who obstinately cut taxes and undercut all efforts at regulation, unleashing today’s profound economic crisis."

And now, McCain has selected as a president-in waiting this hockey mom and female Joe Sixpack who appears to be an impossibility: a version of George W. Bush, who is even stupider than the real thing. "Not since Gaius Caesar Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman Senate has there been such a bonehead choice," says blogger John de Groot.

If McCain wins, and his illness drives him from office, the horse will be not just a senator but the Empress of America, with supreme power to wreck the entire world.

Let us pray. "

If you had purchased $1000.00 of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00. 

With Enron, you would have had $16.50 left of the original $1000.00.
 
With WorldCom, you would have had less than $5.00 left.
 
If you had purchased $1000 of Delta Air Lines stock you would have $49.00 left.
 
But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer/wine one year ago, drank all the beer/wine, then turned in the cans/bottles for the recycling REFUND, you would have had $214.00.
 
Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to Drink heavily and recycle.

When things in your lives seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 cups of coffee.

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded t o fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box o f pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything els e. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an unanimous 'yes.'

The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

'Now,' said the professor as the laughter subsided, 'I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things--your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions--and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car.

The sand is everything else--the small stuff. 'If you put the sand into the jar first,' he continued, 'there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

'Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your spouse out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first--the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.'

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the coffee represented. The professor smiled. 'I'm glad you asked.

It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend.'

Please share this with someone you care about.  
I JUST DID